At a particularly awkward time in my life, I used to keep a secret online journal. Journaling helps me to out process my emotions as well as serve as a way to mark occasions and well, establish facts. Useful when you’re in a relationship with someone who gaslights you and you have all the ADHD forgetting. The ADHD also means I have to have a reward component, so that’s why it was online, because I can type like a demon, and I am strongly externally motivated. Imagining I’m monologuing for an audience provided motivation. Anyway, life got busy. I went back to school. Depression hit hard enough that I got medicated. Life narrowed to slow, loping rhythm while I took upwards of 18 credit hours and sometimes worked multiple jobs. After months of this grind, I had all but shrank into nothingness. Entries to my blog were short, terse. Not florid or deep with my own lore. Just sleep, work, school, study. Sleep, work, school, study. I was more or less at the bedrock of my personality there.
I got a message one day through my secret journal. Someone told me they had accidentally found it a few years before and had been following it at a distance since. It wasn’t on a platform they could subscribe to it, so they bookmarked it and checked it roughly weekly. She acknowledged it was an odd situation, but that she didn’t intend to be creepy. She had noticed I decreased my posting frequency and that my overall tone had shifted. She wanted to let me know she found meaning and comfort in what I wrote, and related to the struggles I’d expressed. She had kind of felt kinship, and wanted to make sure I was okay. I responded and thanked her, letting her know that I was okay, and would be okay. I probably said something more than that. I know she responded, and her response included her email address and I think a genuine offer of friendship. But, well, I thought at that point she may have been my then-girlfriend trying to pull some bullshit, so I never responded. About 6 months later my girlfriend actually did find the journal, and I wiped the whole thing.
I’m reasonably confident my ex was not in the know prior to her discovery, so I suspect this person was a real person. In the moment, wiping the journal was a panic response, but after I sort of felt sad that this voice in the dark - my voice - suddenly and inexplicably went silent for the one person who was listening.